


i would kill to make you feel

by singagainsoon



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Dorks in Love, Emotional Constipation, M/M, they're repressed ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 18:26:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18975874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singagainsoon/pseuds/singagainsoon
Summary: Hermann gets really red when he’s mad - his ears, his cheeks, his stupid fucking cute nose. Even his neck gets these big red spots on it. It’s funny. It’s really, seriously funny.





	i would kill to make you feel

Hermann is the worst. 

Like, objectively.

He just sucks. He’s weird and stuck up and eats baby carrots like candy. His hands are too big, and his face is too  _ handsome _ , and it makes Newt angry. That’s irrational, sure - “ _ Illogical _ ,” Hermann would correct with a haughty sniff, the bastard - but it’s how he feels, right to the tops of his freckled ears. Hermann is the worst when he’s just sitting. He looks like some kind of sweatered gargoyle, all hunched over his desk. Sometimes he rolls his sleeves up to his bony elbows and goes digging in his stupid-neat desk drawers for a snack, and that’s usually when Newt loses it. It’s the proverbial straw that breaks the (metaphorical) camel’s back. It shouldn’t make him so fucking mad all the time, but it does. It just sits in this weird, hard little ball between his lungs like a stone, except it’s not a stone and also it’s on fire. He’s, like, consumed with it almost, to the point where all he can think about ever is how best to piss Hermann off. It’s satisfying, like a good cup of coffee or a nice, hot piece of pizza - the kind with too much cheese and grease that drips down your chin when you bite into it. 

Hermann gets really red when he’s mad - his ears, his cheeks, his stupid fucking cute nose. Even his neck gets these big red spots on it. It’s funny. It’s really, seriously funny.

He used to sit and try to imagine what Hermann would look like. It used to keep him up at night.

Newt peeks up over the tops of his glasses and sneaks a glance across the lab. Hermann is peeling a tangerine. He’s too methodical with it, too careful, and he’s squinting like it’s a puzzle (but it’s  _ not _ , it’s a tangerine, it’s a  _ fruit _ , not some equation to pick apart and solve, and Newt’s hand clenches around his scalpel). His eyes are crinkling at the corners while he’s picking the skin apart with the blunt edge of his fingernail, and there’s this stupid chunk of hair sticking up that’s shorter than the rest where he tried to cut away a cowlick, and-

Newt’s face is hot under his stubble. 

When Hermann yells at him, the tendons in his neck stick out from under the collar of his ridiculous shirt-sweater combo, and his half-moon eyebrows scrunch up in the middle, and his wide mouth makes this weird shape that mouths probably shouldn’t be able to make.  Sometimes, he spits while he’s yelling - a fine, angry spray accompanying words including  _ f _ ’s or  _ s _ ’s. He yells until he’s almost out of breath and then his chest is heaving under his sweater, and he’s got this white-knuckled death grip on his cane. He snapped a piece of chalk in half once. So, yeah, he likes to make Hermann mad.

Newt slices into his newest sample and wonders if maybe he’s a sadist.

 

 

* * *

 

“Would it kill you to be a  _ little _ less insufferable for once in your miserable life?” Hermann says, leaning his cane against his desk and plopping unceremoniously into his chair, his sweater-clad back to Newton. The chair gives a little groan beneath his slight but furious weight.

“Fuck  _ off _ , Hermann,” Newton seethes. There is a thump, the faint sound of metal ringing against metal when he slams his hand against one of the trays of dissection tools, a little cacophony of instruments being jostled. "Just shut the fuck up!" 

Something metallic clatters to the floor behind Hermann. He does not need to look to confirm that Newton has deigned to throw a scalpel, missing by a wide margin.

“It appears your aim, much like your research, needs work.”

“Like  _ you’d  _ know!  You wouldn’t know the first thing about-”

Hermann whirls around in his chair with a speed he had previously not thought himself capable. Something hot boils in the hollow of his throat and burns his lungs.   
  
“As a matter of  _ fact _ , Dr. Geiszler, I would know!” He taps his cane sharply against the floor in spite of the fact that he is sitting down. “You appear to forget that all the nonsense you’ve shat out and had the audacity to call  _ work _ , I’ve had the incredible misfortune to read. Perhaps your frequent memory lapses are contributing to the overall quality of your credibility in your field, Newton.”

Hermann makes a show of shuffling some papers. He places a stray pencil into the little cup on his desk. What he really wants, face red from the exertion, from the shouting, is to spin back around and pull Dr. Geiszler down to his face by his ridiculous too-skinny tie to kiss him full on the mouth. He will not, of course. Hermann does not dare to do anything other than sit and steam quietly for a few hours, pretending to be hard at work on his equations while he considers much too long the notion of taking a risk for once in his life. 

If Newton’s clothes weren't always covered in viscera (and his hands, too, which Hermann cannot refrain from envisioning stuffed up the back of his shirt or cupping his face tenderly, health hazards aside), perhaps Hermann  _ would _ kiss him. Perhaps he would sweep Newton grandly into his arms and kiss him the way he had been letting himself imagine for nearly a decade, pressed firmly against the wall or one of their desks (even the chalkboard, though the idea of smudging his hard work is appalling even in a fantasy of his own fevered creation) -

He hazards a glance back at Newton in time to catch the man snapping his gaze, flustered, back down into the stinking corpse of some great, hulking beast: his rumpled shirt stretched across his tattooed arms, face screwed up tight in concentration, in anger, up to his gloved elbows in a carcass. He is infuriating and terrible in every possible definition of the word (and likely in definitions, too, that cannot yet be put into expression). 

But there are times when he laughs, loud and boisterous, and it shakes his belly beneath his button-up shirt, and Hermann’s heart aches impossibly for what could have been, what a foolish part of him still hopes there could be. Somehow. That seems a terribly distant notion, something to be looked at and wished for through the magnifying lens of a telescope while it sits, already dead and burnt-out where Hermann will never reach it. 

It is difficult to reconcile this Newton, stationed tight-lipped and fuming over their newly-implemented line of yellow tape down the center of the lab, with the Newton who had sent him letters and photos and thinly-veiled declarations of love for years. Hermann had wanted to kiss him even then, from the moment he tore open the envelope of Newton’s second letter.

Perhaps he would, some day- just stand right up and press his lips to Newt’s. Would Newton be surprised, he wonders? Surely not, if the way they used to speak to each other in their letters is any decent indicator. Newton catches his wandering eyes, curls his top lip into a scowl, and Hermann turns resignedly back to his work.

No.

Hermann thinks he would not.

**Author's Note:**

> its been a WHILE but im so glad to post my contribution to this fantastic zine! i'm honored to have been a part of something wonderful. catch me on twit @kaijubf


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